June 24 to 29, 2016, Acadia NP at Schoodic Woods and Mt. Desert Island
In parts of Acadia National Park the points of land are big, solid slabs of granite with colorful inclusions cut through with bands of solid black rock called diabase. (I don’t know how that word is pronounced; made me think of a girl in school I fancied named DeeDee Diabasi.) The diabase gives way after thousands of years of the forces of nature (unlike the unerodable Ms. Diabasi) leaving channels and canyons straight down into the harder, uneroded granite.
(Me over an eroded channel moments before I undressed and dove off.)
The twelve foot tides and spray of the crashing waves fill pools in the gone diabase, and the pools sustain amazing varieties of colorful sea life.
Then you go around a corner and there is a mile long beach of perfectly rounded cobbles of all sizes and types of stone—small discs of perfectly smoothed black and cannonballs of orange granite and white granite ovoid rocks. They make a sound like chimes when you walk on them.
Around the next corner is a perfect little pond reflecting a perfect blue and white sky and the perfect pine trees around the edge. Looks like it came from the set designer’s crate marked “Maine.” All that’s missing is the moose who is out on a cigarette break.
Then you go around a corner and there is a vast floodplain either draining to or being filled by the gulf of Maine through a narrow opening that is rushing in one direction or another. You can walk over a bridge, in a little town in Maine, under which the water is rushing as hard as any mountain stream in one direction, have breakfast at a little store, and when you walk back over the bridge the water is rushing just as hard in the other direction. The sea is always busy here.
Then you go around a corner and find that $4 shower place that you’ve been looking for, for days, because Acadia NP doesn’t have shower facilities and the Scamp doesn’t have the storage capacity for the water needed to rinse the acreage under my authority.
Around the next corner is a sandy beach surrounded by steep rises of fir, the only sandy beach in northern Maine judging by the cars parked along the road and the crowds flowing towards it. You look down on it from a bend in the road, turn another corner and you are on a 200 foot cliff overlooking the whole of the Gulf of Maine to the Atlantic with terns and gulls wheeling around the massive columns of rock just offshore and fog creeping around the far point.
You go up and around and now you are on a ridge looking across a green valley and fog is massed on the far ridge and spilling over like the vapor from dry ice. A little further on you are on top of Cadillac Mountain and can see to the horizon in all directions, the fog moving in towards Bar Harbor and sweeping over the near islands like a demonstration of a wind tunnel, snaking up one side of a cliffed island and streaming away over the lee side.
Then you have to leave and just outside of the park you pull over and there are work boats tied in the harbor, in the mist, looking mystical and toy-like.
Not bad for $15/night courtesy of National Parks senior pass (which one of us was entitled to.)